HP’s Z620 redefines the workstation

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When HP offered us a chance to review its new Z620 workstation, I was curious but cautious. The advent of multi-core processors back in 2005 dramatically reshaped the workstation market; consumer PCs now offer core counts at a tenth the price (or less) of what such systems cost in 2004. A dual-socket system capable of handling two octal-core/16-thread processors with a turbo speed of 3.8GHz is impressive on paper, but could the box live up to its potential in real life?

When UPS dropped the mid-tower-sized box off, I groaned inwardly. Given the components (16GB of RAM, 800W PSU, 16 CPU cores, and a Quadro 6000), I’d expected a full-sized tower. Any mid-tower packing the same components would, I thought, undoubtedly be a veritable wind tunnel under load.

Happily, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Z620 is built with an attention to detail that would impress even the most jaded user. HP sent along a base configuration, as shown below, but also included two additional components to allow us to measure the benefit of the upgrades: A Quadro 6000 GPU, and a 256GB Micron C400 SSD.

HP Z620 800W 90% Efficient Chassis

HP Z620 Country Kit

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64bit OS

2x Intel Xeon E5-2690 2.90Ghz 20MB 1600 8C CPUs

NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2GB Graphics

16GB DDR3-1600 (8x2GB) 2CPU RAM

1TB 7200 RPM SATA 1st Hard Drive

Slot Load 8X SuperMulti DVDRW ODD

Base Price: $10,520

Additional Equipment: Quadro 6000 ($3999)

Micron RealSSD C400 (256GB): $380

Upgraded Price: $14,900

Workstation features, workstation pricing

Before we launch into the review, let’s pause and consider some context. The Z620 is built around Intel’s new E5 Xeon family. These processors are based on the same design as the consumer-level Core i7-3960X that Intel launched last year; top-end E5’s offer up to eight cores and 20MB of L3 cache as compared to the 3960X’s six-core/15MB L3 arrangement.

The Z620 is an update to the older, Z600 series. It supports eight-core CPUs (the Z600 topped out at hexa-core), offers 2x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 3.0 x8 slot (x4 electrically), one PCIe 2.0 x8 slot (also x4 electrically), an PCIe 2.0 x4/x1 slot, and one legacy PCI slot. There are bays for three 3.5-inch drives and two 5.25-inch externals. The 800W, 90% efficient power supply is capable of driving up to 300W of GPU power; the Z600 only supported a 150W GPU. Finally, the number of LAN ports has been bumped up to 2x1Gbit Intel solutions as opposed to the Z600’s single 1Gbit Broadcom. Nvidia’s Tesla GPU Compete platform is also explicitly supported.

The Z620 we reviewed is at the top end of HP’s price range for the family — entry systems start at $1649. If the five-figure price tag on our unit has you seeing stars, it may help to understand a bit more about the workstation environment and associated costs. A single copy of Autodesk’s 3ds Max 2013, for example, is $3999. The humans who use the hardware likely earn significantly more than that a month. Production companies, meanwhile, are often charged penalties if they fail to meet a deadline.

When you add up the associated costs, a $10,000 PC accounts for just a fraction of the company’s total expenses. Companies still care about maximizing performance per dollar spent, but reliability and 24-hour replacement guarantees matter more than the upfront hardware expense.

As I read on it really struck me the very high premium you pay for this system! I’ve been using workstations since my first dual pentium 90 (Yes I’m that old!) arrived. I’ve built dual CPU workstation my whole carreer for my DCC (mostly 3D animation) business. Saying that, I’ve found that in recent times the premium for dual CPU has steadily increased to a point of not really giving value, even to mainstream DCC users.

Unless you are running 3D rendering applications with extremely large data sets that you need to move around in real time and/or need to do a lot of massive, complicated test renders, this system is really doesn’t make economical sense…

Don’t get me wrong: Having 32 threads for rendering would be really nice, but for long animation renderings a small render farm of small hex-core machines, or even a third party render service makes a lot more sense at this price point. The sweet spot of $ per Ghz Cores is not in $4k processors and video cards…

Unless you need a massive amount of compute horsepower right at your fingertips (and very few, even high end DCC projects need that) I’d rather build myself a nice Hex-Core WS out of premium main-stream components and get more render power outside that box..

Joel Hruska

Armando,

I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but there’s ancillary costs to consider. At a certain point, power consumption (and cooling) have to be factored in as well. On an individual level, it may well be cheaper to build 2-3 boxes and render via network, but at a certain point, physical space, noise, and power consumption will begin to weigh against this approach.

This makes me think the rising costs of Professional-grade workstation components be the reason for Apple’s reluctance to release a MacPro desktop.

Feels like they want to keep their high margins and its a more profitable strategy to ditch the Professionals in favor of the Prosumers.

Joel Hruska

Angel,

As I said, this is the highest-end system you can build. It’s not representative of what you’d pay for a midrange or entry-level workstation. It’s *certainly* got nothing to do with Apple’s failure to update the Mac Pro.

Yaro Kasear

No, if it was as high-end as possible, they’d put a serious workhorse operating system on it, not Windows.

Yaro Kasear

… Eh. Nobody’s gotten serious work done on an Apple workstation. At least no work that would require a machine of these specs. You’re not seeing companies like Pixar using Mac Pros for anything beyond creating textures. Sadly, this workstation isn’t going to be doing serious number-crunching work with Windows on it either.

Yaro Kasear

“Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64bit OS”

*So* close to being a legitimate high-end workstation. You want an actual ultra high-end powerhouse workstation you’d put UNIX on it instead. Windows is only on workstations because it is “easy,” not because its powerful. You put all that high end hardware in there Windows will utterly waste its potential.

Joel Hruska

That’s such a load of BS. Windows will “utterly waste its potential?”

What universe are you living in? The days of high-end, ultra-specialized operating systems and their associated vendor lock-ins are over. Look at the debacle over Itanium between Intel/HP and Oracle if you don’t believe me.

If you’re going to make such ridiculous, unsubstantiated claims, the burden is on you to demonstrate them. So either find some benchmarks that show an apples-to-apples comparison between Unix and Windows when doing 3D rendering (since that’s the focus of this story), or step into the 21st century with the rest of us.

This is a $10,000 workstation, not a $500 PC. If HP thought it needed a Unix OS to be competitive, they’d SELL it with one.

michaeljustgreat

If you really want to test your hardware at its maximum, just use the chess program Deep Fritz 13 (it is the chess GUI) with the chess engine Houdini 2.0c and various chess test complex positions and you will see that even your 16 threads x 2 will be fully used!

Markus Creech

For the life of me I can’t find the z620 on the HP website. I see the z620 but its price is nowhere near these prices. What am I missing?

Dear sir or to whomeso ever it concern … i am looking for workstation z620 to purchase .. our company is located in saudi arabia riyadh… we need urgent kindly suggest where i can find with best price …. ( purchase can be done only in saudi arabia and dubai ) or send me quotation on operations@futuretechsa.com

Mark Otten

Joel, nice job on the testing and the article. We’re currently evaluting this very configuration and finding this analysis is very helpful.
We’re considering buying them without the GPU installed and buying them seperately.
Any suggestions on alternatives to the Q4000?

Stoyan Varlyakov

Maybe this is already said, but the E5-2620 is an hexacore (6) not octacore (8) …

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